From Servant to Friend
Ordination Anniversary Scripture Readings
Fifty years ago today, I knelt before the altar of Saint Charles Cathedral a boy, and stood up a priest, but that was neither the beginning nor the end. In a sense, I could say it started on the upstairs playroom porch in our family home in West Hartford, Connecticut, one day in 1957. I was sitting on the floor by myself, playing with wooden blocks. I put a short block across a longer block and saw that it made a cross. As soon as I looked at it, someone spoke to me in my own mental voice and said, “You’re going to be a priest.” My immediate thought was: that was the craziest thought I’d ever had, because I knew I wasn’t good enough in school ever to do that. At the same time, have you ever had a moment when you knew you’d never be the same afterward? For me, that was one of those moments to such a degree that I remember exactly where it was and what I was doing, and exactly what it sounded like and exactly how I felt—even at nine years old.
Even that wasn’t the beginning, though, as I think about it now. Our parish church, Saint Thomas the Apostle, had been a constant in my life as a child. I remember attending Mass in the downstairs church because the upstairs hadn’t been built yet. As I was remembering what it was like down there, I just had an image flash across the screen of my mind, standing there with a bunch of people off to one side of the altar at a baptism—my brother, Doug’s baptism—and I was still a few months away from being three. Like it or not, accept it or not, the Catholic Church and its priesthood have been the focus of my attention from the beginning. No matter how hard I tried to get away from it—and I did—it was never of any use. At one point, I had to admit that, when God got his hooks into you, there was no wriggling free.
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you,
a prophet to the nations I appointed you.”
“Ah, Lord God!” I said, “I know not how to speak; I am too young.”
I understand—in fact, I’ve always understood—how Jeremiah felt. There are three sacraments—three moments of grace—they say imprint a character on your soul. The idea of “character” comes from that exact Greek word. It means an impression like the face on a coin or the image on a wax seal. It’s more than an image, though; it’s an identity. It marks a thing as belonging to someone. It’s a relationship like your signature on a piece of paper that binds you to it. What’s particularly interesting about this concept is what it doesn’t do. The die doesn’t change the coin’s silver. The ring doesn’t make the wax seal into something other than what it is. It simply acknowledges the bond between an object and its owner.
We’ve been taught that the sacraments of the Christian Church are efficacious. They do something. But the traditional way of thinking of them in Aristotelian terms of change through matter and form has warped our thinking somewhat. Yes, the sacraments do effect change, but not in terms of creating something out of nothing. They are not magic. The change that the sacraments effect are like the change of the die to the coin or the seal to the wax. They are the acknowledgment of an existing relationship that elevates that relationship to a higher level merely by that acknowledgment. Baptism doesn’t make someone a Christian. It acknowledges publicly that the relationship to Christ is there. Confirmation doesn’t suddenly infuse someone with the Holy Spirit. It’s a public acknowledgment of the power of the Holy Spirit at work in a person’s life. So it is with all the sacraments. Each of them is transformative in that it raises the power of God at work in human lives to a new level by publicly acknowledging its presence and activity.
So it is with Holy Orders. Ordination didn’t put something new and foreign there. It acknowledged publicly that it was there—and had always been there—and raised it to a new level where it could grow and mature in a broader context. And, let me tell you, no matter how carefully defined our roles may be as Christians or as priests, it never—and I do mean never—plays out according to the script. A person like me may have been convinced of what it means to be a priest. Only, slowly but surely, most of that falls by the wayside, or fades, or is stripped away. Only slowly do we come to realize that what we thought a priest was, was only in retrospect what a priest does. Think about it. All the things you think about when you imagine what it’s like to be a priest—all the actions and words and duties and responsibilities—all of them are functions. They’re privileges of ordination, of that public acknowledgment, but they define a priestly doing, not a priestly being.
“I no longer call you slaves…” in Greek, δουλος (doulos), servant, functionary “…because a doulos does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.” And there it is. What happens to the priest when the doulos is stripped away? When the Roman collar is folded away in a drawer? When there’s no more community to minister or preach to? When the quasi-monastic life of the rectory becomes the hermitage of the apartment and the cubicle? When nobody anymore assumes you’re smarter than they, or more experienced than they, or more important than they, or holier than they? When all of that is gone, what’s left but the three-year-old feeling at the same time awe-struck and at home? But the nine-year-old shaken to the core by a voice both strange and intimate? But the twenty-seven-year-old, feeling the weight of the Unknown pressing on his head in the hands of the bishop? But the broken-hearted thirty-eight-year-old packing up a lifetime of dreams with nowhere to go but knowing he couldn’t stay here? But the man, learning to shoulder the burdens of adulting by trial and error? And every step of the way, learning the meaning of these words, “It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain.” Every step of the way is a lesson in what it means as a priest to the core to be a friend.
The friend that Jesus spoke of isn’t a buddy. It is, in Hebrew רֵעַ (re’a), the covenant companion, the one for whom you’d lay down your life, the one you learn to rely on when all else fails. That’s the friend that’s revealed when the servant—the doulos—is no longer useful. Today isn’t an anniversary, it’s an anamnesis. It’s the past, presenting itself to the future, not just for me in my ministry, but for ours. “If you keep my commandments—not do’s and don’ts but our covenant of love—you will remain in my love.” And so, Christ’s priesthood remains, yesterday, today, and into tomorrow—and may the Lord accept the sacrifice at our hands for the praise and glory of his name, for our good and the good of all his Church.
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